Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to distributed computing environments and the completion of tasks within such environments. In particular, the present invention teaches a variety of software-based architectures for communication and cooperation among distributed electronic agents. Certain embodiments teach interagent communication languages enabling client agents to make requests in the form of arbitrarily complex goal expressions that are solved through facilitation by a facilitator agent.
Context and Motivation for Distributed Software Systems
The evolution of models for the design and construction of distributed software systems is being driven forward by several closely interrelated trends: the adoption of a networked computing model, rapidly rising expectations for smarter, longer-lived, more autonomous software applications and an ever increasing demand for more accessible and intuitive user interfaces.
Prior Art FIG. 1 illustrates a networked computing model 100 having a plurality of client and server computer systems 120 and 122 coupled together over a physical transport mechanism 140. The adoption of the networked computing model 100 has lead to a greatly increased reliance on distributed sites for both data and processing resources. Systems such as the networked computing model 100 are based upon at least one physical transport mechanism 140 coupling the multiple computer systems 120 and 122 to support the transfer of information between these computers. Some of these computers basically support using the network and are known as client computers (clients). Some of these computers provide resources to other computers and are known as server computers (servers). The servers 122 can vary greatly in the resources they possess, access they provide and services made available to other computers across a network. Servers may service other servers as well as clients.
The Internet is a computing system based upon this network computing model. The Internet is continually growing, stimulating a paradigm shift for computing away from requiring all relevant data and programs to reside on the user's desktop machine. The data now routinely accessed from computers spread around the world has become increasingly rich in format, comprising multimedia documents, and audio and video streams. With the popularization of programming languages such as JAVA, data transported between local and remote machines may also include programs that can be downloaded and executed on the local machine. There is an ever increasing reliance on networked computing, necessitating software design approaches that allow for flexible composition of distributed processing elements in a dynamically changing and relatively unstable environment.
In an increasing variety of domains, application designers and users are coming to expect the deployment of smarter, longer-lived, more autonomous, software applications. Push technology, persistent monitoring of information sources, and the maintenance of user models, allowing for personalized responses and sharing of preferences, are examples of the simplest manifestations of this trend. Commercial enterprises are introducing significantly more advanced approaches, in many cases employing recent research results from artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, and other fields.
More than ever before, the increasing complexity of systems, the development of new technologies, and the availability of multimedia material and environments are creating a demand for more accessible and intuitive user interfaces. Autonomous, distributed, multi-component systems providing sophisticated services will no longer lend themselves to the familiar “direct manipulation” model of interaction, in which an individual user masters a fixed selection of commands provided by a single application. Ubiquitous computing, in networked environments, has brought about a situation in which the typical user of many software services is likely to be a non-expert, who may access a given service infrequently or only a few times. Accommodating such usage patterns calls for new approaches. Fortunately, input modalities now becoming widely available, such as speech recognition and pen-based handwriting/gesture recognition, and the ability to manage the presentation of systems' responses by using multiple media provide an opportunity to fashion a style of human-computer interaction that draws much more heavily on our experience with human—human interactions.